BuzzSumo vs. Muck Rack

It's well suited for marketing agencies of all sizes who need to quickly monitor the placements of their clients in the media. It's helpful to professional content creators to see how existing content and topics are performing online. It's perhaps less appropriate for a single freelance user with a limited budget who could do much of that work for free online, albeit with far greater consumption of their most valuable resource - time.

Incentivized

Muck Rack has the potential to be a very powerful tool that can improve PR agency efficiency across the board. The death knell for Muck Rack, and the reason why we terminated our contract early, was that they offered a complimentary six-month on-ramp to win our business. In other words, we had six full months to use Muck Rack while we were still using the other two vendors' products. Multiple team members compared results head-to-head for a wide range of our clients and Muck Rack simply did not stack up. That six-month overlap period proved to be very eye-opening and enabled us to reveal what we found to be severe limitations in terms of the quality of the database and the quality of the reporting.

Incentivized

• From Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit data, to large scale content analysis, influencers, trending news stories and media alerts, you get it all.
• Helps me find the best topics for content writing, allows my organization to track word patterns.
• Finding influencers and researching topics.

Incentivized

• The media alert function is awesome! Google Alerts can't get the detail I need, nor do they filter just for the media. I can set media alerts for particular selection factors such as everyone with "education" as their beat.
• I am liking the notes ability to log interactions with particular media. This helps me not have to track down conversation chains or actions with media.
• The interface screen is modern. I love that if I am running a search in one screen, when I click on a particular person or outlet, it opens ANOTHER screen so that I don't have use the back button. I can open, say 10 people at once and compare their notes.
• I love the PDF summaries from lists. I love the Who shared feature. I LOVE EVERYTHING in MuckRack!

Incentivized

• Although I think it's hard, I'd like to see it being used for other mediums as well such as Twitch, etc.
• It could have better backlink data to include more backlinks that each content piece has.
• One or two more pricing tiers might work.

Incentivized

• When you export a media list, it does not include the email address so you have to search for it offline or on the journalist's profile. It's annoying.
• Sometimes when you save a list, not all the contacts you marked are saved and you have to do it over.
• There isn't a "click all" button to add all of the contacts to a list. You have to wait until all the people load - which isn't ideal for productivity.

Incentivized

It's the best tool we've found for this type of product. It is not 100% critical to our daily responsibilities, but as a corporate tool made available to us, it is something we leverage on a weekly basis.

The interface is a little clunky for me, especially on mobile. However, the directions are clear and it didn't take long for me to figure out how to use it. I just wish that things were a little more streamlined.

Incentivized

Little training was required to leverage the tool. It is a very intuitive platform. The only troublesome aspect of the tool has been the email integration features, but that may be more of a security/IT issue with our corporate requirements than a Much Rack problem. Overall, it is a tool that anyone can leverage without much effort.

The support we have received over the years has been wonderful. They have definitely demonstrated excellent customer service. We find the chat support to be the quickest and most useful for the day-to-day questions. A rep always responds very timely, answers our questions, and sends a follow-up to ensure we're maintaining success

Incentivized

Any time I have had an issue or a question about something on the platform, someone on the chat now function has always answered within 10 mins at most! Everyone I have worked with has been extremely friendly and quick to solve. There is never the inconvenience of having to call, talk to a robot, or deal with an automated email. Customer service is extremely personal and each account also has a designated account manager to oversee the relationship

Incentivized

I was not involved with the implementation.

• Sprout Social and Salesforce are extremely expensive and don't offer the same powerful content marketing features that Buzzsumo offers for a third of the price
• The crisis monitoring and social listening tools within Buzzsumo are much more user-friendly
• The permissions in Sprout Social get very confusion and setup has been a pain and the content analysis features aren't that intuitive

Incentivized

I previously used Cision PRWeb. It was a good service, but for what I needed it wasn't as affordable and I also found the backend system difficult to navigate and manage. I loved the ease of use and the ability to find out what I needed almost immediately once I logged into Muck Rack. Because I have to think so much already, having a platform that takes the weight off having to do a lot of extra research and ask questions to just use the system effectively and efficiently is a gift.

Incentivized

• It has had a positive return as it has allowed us to create better content and gain popularity online.
• Though the cost is relatively high in my opinion, it has allowed us to make better organic content than we would have paid this cost on ads.
• Helps us find influencers for campaigns.

Incentivized

• Muck Rack has paid for itself, as the ability to access its media database is essential to the media relations work I do on behalf of my client. By having access, it helps me make strategic choices of which media to pitch for what and when, which ultimately leads to positive client placements in key articles. This in turn leads to happy clients!

Incentivized